mw731914@ohio.edu
Journalists surround a member of the white nationalist Traditionalist Workers Party in Charlottesville
They say that the first step to solving a problem is admitting you have one. Thankfully, that is what The United States is starting to do about it's problem with normalizing hate crimes. In order to jumpstart change about the immense amount of white supremacist terror attacks we have been having lately, we must start at the basics and realize what our society is doing wrong.
In an article titled Media struggles to develop strategies covering hate incidents, author Yang Sun discusses how even though a large number of hate crimes have happened throughout the past couple of years, only a fraction of them have been officially reported to places like the FBI and the Census Bureau because there hasn't been enough coverage of many of these events. Newsrooms often treat hate crimes as individual situations, when they need to be treated as a problem as a whole. If we as journalists can better report these incidents, we could not only make more crimes appear on the federal hate crimes statistics, but change the way that some Americans normalize hate crimes. Christopher Benson, an associate professor of African-American Studies and Journalism at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign stated that it's a journalist's responsibility to bring people awareness in order for people to understand what is going on and want to make a change. "Until we are able to appreciate that context ourselves as media professionals, we are not going to be able to clarify that for the public," he stated. The SPLC counted 917 hate groups nationwide in 2016. Why isn't this fact a big worry or well known fact to the common American citizen? Most likely because facts like that are not made prevalent in the news, when they should be.
Another thing that needs to be changed in the media is the fact that the media makes it seem like there are more non-American terrorists in the United States than there are white terrorists, which is quite the opposite of the real situation. An article titled White-supremacy threat demands its own beat reporters, the author Christina Mbakwe questions why the media doesn't cover white supremacy the way they cover ISIS because in fact, there are more frequent and more deadly white terrorist attacks occurring in the United States than attacks from ISIS. She also brought up a good point that during the attacks on Charlottesville, people started tweeting the hashtag #ThisIsNotUs, saying that violence and racism isn't the American way. If we take a step back and look at our history, violence and racism sometimes, in fact, our way. We ignore our violent history more often than we should, and if we did accept our history and our present problems as well, maybe we would be able to move forward better. If we had covered Charlottesville in a better way, maybe more people would've gotten a grip of America's problem. "If more newsrooms covered white supremacy with the intensity it deserves, fewer white people might have been surprised by the events in Charlottesville. The response instead could have been, 'This is us, and all the signs have been there".
To solve this, American journalists as well as citizens must come together to raise awareness. These problems will not be heard of unless they are truthfully shown to the world. Once we show the country how serious of a problem there is with hate crimes, more people will be aware of the intensity of the situation, and we can come up with a way to make these problems a little better. Until that happens, there will be no progress with the way hate crimes are starting to become commonplace in America.
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